Congress has a few immediate jobs when it returns to work next week: meeting two funding deadlines in less than a month and averting government shutdowns; coming up with a budget for both 2024 and 2025; and passing a supplemental funding package with aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. All of these are intertwined, and all of them are endangered by a Republican House that seems to be hell-bent on forcing a government shutdown over the completely unrelated issue of immigration.
The government is a third of the way into the 2024 fiscal year, and none of the 12 appropriations bills that fund all the various agencies and departments have been passed and signed into law. Since the beginning of the fiscal year on Oct. 1, the government has been running on two successive continuing resolutions, the second of which has set the Jan. 19 and Feb. 2 funding deadlines. Funding for military construction and veterans programs, Agriculture and food agencies, and the departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development expires first, then the State, Defense, Commerce, Labor, and Health and Human Services departments, among others, last until Feb. 2.
Ideally, the negotiations House and Senate leadership are having now to figure out spending for the rest of 2024 would be done and the funding bills passed by before those dates. Since there are just seven working days between now and the first deadline, that’s not going to happen. Also ideally, those discussions would further Congress in the other job it’s supposed to be starting now: establishing the 2025 budget. This is the backdrop against which a small bipartisan group in the Senate is trying to find a compromise on immigration that Republicans would agree to and thus allow the supplemental aid package to Ukraine to pass.
That’s the situation in a nutshell. Now enter the House Republicans who have become intent on tying government funding to the draconian anti-immigration legislation they passed last year, a bill that’s a complete non-starter with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the White House. Senate Republicans started this, intent on holding Ukraine aid hostage to immigration. Now a group of House Republicans—predictably the Freedom Caucus—is going one further and vowing to hold everything hostage to their bill. Speaker Mike Johnson didn’t go so far when speaking from the border on Wednesday, but said his goals are to “get the border closed and secured … and we want to make sure that we reduce non-defense discretionary spending.”
That’s what they’re going to get if they don’t agree to a budget and pass appropriations bills, because even if they come to an agreement on a CR to keep the government doors open, not passing those funding bills means cuts. That’s because the debt ceiling deal President Joe Biden and former Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to last May built in those cuts as an incentive for Congress to do its job. That means a 10% across-the-board cut to all non-defense spending, to the tune of $73 billion. Those cuts were supposed to be applied to defense spending too, which was the stick that was meant to get Republicans on board. But subsequent CRs superseded the debt ceiling agreement, the end result being an extra $25 billion for defense.
What’s at risk in all of this is the future of Ukraine, first and foremost. Continued U.S. support in its war against the Russian invaders is essential for military operations and for stopping further Russian aggression. Even Johnson has admitted that much. “[W]e can’t allow Vladimir Putin to prevail in Ukraine because I don’t believe it would stop there, and it would probably encourage and empower China to perhaps make a move on Taiwan,” Johnson said in an interview last fall.
Beyond that, there are those massive cuts to domestic programs. Washington Democrat Sen. Patty Murray, chair of the Appropriations Committee, warned last month of “absolutely devastating, across-the-board cuts on virtually all domestic programs … Let’s be clear about the damage here: immediate hiring freezes and furloughs at just about every agency.” On top of that, she warned about drastic cuts to programs for young families and federal housing assistance cuts for 700,000 households.
“Consider what kind of precedent it sets, if now—months after a spending agreement was negotiated and passed into law, three months into the current fiscal year—House Republicans want to pull the rug out from the rest of us, and go back on their word and the deal that they cut,” Murray said.
That’s exactly what the House Republicans seem intent on doing while not caring at all that they’re breaking everything along the way, including precedent.
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